Steve Reads

I tried reading Paradise Lost some years ago, and eventually abandoned the undertaking. This is the book about which Samuel Johnson famously said that “None ever wished it longer than it is.” (I can’t find the source for that quote; if anyone knows it, please let me know.) It’s one of those books that I felt like a rube for disliking.

But Milton is far more than Paradise Lost. In particular, my faint historical understanding says that he was an important part of the Puritan Revolution in England, for instance, and that among many other things he was a politician: Areopagitica was just one of his political tracts.

Or so I understand. I know very little about Milton. I have this problem, where if I dislike my first taste of an author, it’s extremely unlikely that I’ll come back for seconds — whereas if the first was great and the second, third, and fourth were only so-so, I’ll come back for fifths and sixths. That is, first impressions really matter for me.

But I’m willing to give Milton a second try. Does anyone know him well enough to tour me through his work?

P.S.: Ah. The Johnson quote is from the “Life of Milton”, which appears to be an essay within a larger work either entitled Lives of the Poets or Lives of the English Poets and a Criticism of their Work. Here’s the quote in context:

Here is a full display of the united force of study and genius; of a great accumulation of materials, with judgement to digest and fancy to combine them: Milton was able to select from nature or from story, from ancient fable or from modern science, whatever could illustrate or adorn his thoughts. An accumulation of knowledge impregnated his mind, fermented by study and exalted by imagination.

It has been therefore said without an indecent hyperbole by one of his encomiasts, that in reading Paradise Lost we read a book of universal knowledge.

But original deficience cannot be supplied. The want of human interest is always felt. Paradise Lost is one of the books which the reader admires and lays down, and forgets to take up again. None ever wished it longer than it is. Its perusal is a duty rather than a pleasure. We read Milton for instruction, retire harassed and overburdened, and look elsewhere for recreation; we desert our master, and seek for companions.